


No Job Too Small

by tisfan



Series: Imagine Tony and Bucky 2016/2017 [30]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dad Bucky Barnes, Fluff, Kid Fic, Kid Pietro Maximoff, Kid Wanda Maximoff, M/M, past Nat/Bucky, take your kids to work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 00:11:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12096447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: Take your Kid to Work day...Yeah, great idea. When Bucky's twins get loose in Stark Industries, that... might be a problem.





	No Job Too Small

**Author's Note:**

> Imagine Bucky is an employee at Stark Industries and one day he has to bring his child in. And of course child somehow gets lost and ends up in Tony's office where tony is completely charmed.

“Okay, Wanda,” Bucky said, directing his child toward the guest-chair in his office. He had to clear a stack of papers off it before she could sit; Bucky’s office was nothing short of a disaster, something his supervisor liked to complain about. “You get to sit in this chair, and Piet--” Crap, where was Pietro again? Bucky could swear that kid was quicksilver, he disappeared every single time Bucky didn’t have eyes on him for three seconds, tops.

Under his desk, Bucky heard a faint scrape. “There you are!”

In his fantasies, Bucky was going to strangle Pepper Potts. Last year -- and all the years between last year and when the twins were born -- the Bring Your Kid to Work day had been on a school day, and even though his kids had just started first grade, he had them enrolled in an advanced day care center practically when his ex had presented him with her testing kit and the two little pink lines.

This year, however, Potts had rescheduled so that the company event was on one of the few bank holidays that the school was closed, but Stark Industries was not.

(Not that Bucky, as a member of the IT security department, got bank holidays off. Operations was too vital for things like President’s Day. And today had proved that for sure; he’d had to push his kids into Darcy Lewis’s tender care for the first few hours of the day, when there was a massive DDOS attack against their servers. Fortunately, that had only taken about an hour to divert the incoming attacks to the dummy proxy VR farm that Bucky’d been tinkering with as a side project for a while. He was just patting himself smugly on the back when Darcy had thrust Wanda at him and told him “take your little witch and get out of my life.”)

“I found a nickel,” Piet informed Bucky, holding out the black and dingy coin.

“Good for you,” Bucky said as Piet put it in his pocket. “Stop prospectin’ under my desk and go sit with your sister.”

Piet’s lower lip pooched out. “She’s gonna bite me.”

“She’s not going to bite you,” Bucky said. That may or may not have been a lie. Wanda’d gone through a few biting phases, and Piet had borne the worst of it. He was pretty sure she was over it -- the last few times she’d bitten anyone, she’d lost television privileges for a week -- but putting the twins in any sort of new situation often flared up their various behavioral problems.

“I am going to bite him,” Wanda reported, looking up from Bucky’s phone where she was gleefully blowing up pigs in _Angry Birds_. “If he pokes me. Or wiggles too much. Or looks at me. He _deserves_ it.”

Bucky rubbed his hand over his face. “No one’s biting anyone.”

“Says you,” Wanda said.

“Yes, I did. No biting, young lady,” Bucky said. Damn, he wished Nat was here. She could get the kids to behave. Of course, the fact that the kids only saw their mother in person about twice a year had a lot to do with that. Piet in particular had come to the conclusion that if he misbehaved around Nat, she’d just leave and never come back.

“But--”

“No buts,” Bucky said. He knelt down in front of the chair. “Do we need to talk about why you shouldn’t hurt people, again?”

Wanda wriggled a bit, putting her finger to the side of her mouth like she was considering it. Bucky wasn’t sure if she was deciding if she wanted the lecture, or if she wanted to bite her brother, but he let her think it through.

“I won’t bite Piet,” she said, finally.

“Thank you, kiddo,” Bucky said.

“He’s not here to bite anyway,” Wanda pointed out.

_Oh. Oh, god._

***

The nice thing about being Tony Stark was that no one actually expected to find him in his top-floor fishbowl style office.

He was usually found showing up exactly where his employees didn’t want him -- Maria Hill had been utterly scandalized the one time she’d found Tony on his back, under the floor panels, helping with a rack power grid installation, covered with dirt. The poor electricians who’d let him assist had no idea who he was, and they were terrified they were going to lose their jobs. Tony’d promoted Scott Lang immediately, and his assistant a few months after that, and Tony dropped in on them at lunch from time to time. Scott had used one of his bonuses to buy the electricians under his command a shiny new espresso machine, which Tony found as a convenient excuse to drop in.

Or, he was in the labs and workshops, chasing R&D out of their moleholes, helping with ideas, working the Stark magic.

So when he was all fucking peopled out from a terrible board meeting, a shitty press conference about the DDOS attacks on Stark Industries and the possibility of compromised information, the stand-up with Cyber Security team leads, and the loss of one of their best researchers -- Tony still wasn’t sure why Parker had left to work for Oscorps, the man had never indicated that he was unsatisfied with his work at SI -- he retreated to his office.

Where no one was going to look for him.

Tony kicked off his expensive, but not particularly comfortable shoes and loosened his tie as soon as he walked into the office. Hung his jacket on the back of the door and cuffed his shirt sleeves.

He considered the decanter of bourbon that, even now, he kept under the sideboard cabinet. Everyone knew Tony Stark had an alcohol problem; very few people knew that he’d managed to kick it to the curb. So he still kept the bottle, offered a drink to high-end clients or peers, but also as a symbol of the thing that he’d beaten. Which also meant that whenever he had a shit day, he had to deal with that temptation, golden and gleaming.

Tony threw himself into his leather desk chair, stretching his arms over his head and extending his feet--

Into a soft shape that squeaked.

“What the actual _fuck_?”

“You kicked me!” An indignant voice complained.

Tony rolled his tongue around in his mouth for a moment, utterly at a loss. “You’re under my desk,” he pointed out, “which is where my feet _go_.”

“You weren’t here,” the voice continued.

Tony almost -- almost -- slouched in his chair to peer under his desk, but then, it was his desk, after all. “Come out here where I can look at you.”

A shock of nearly white hair emerged and Tony had just enough time to wonder if his office had been invaded by hobbits or something, when the kid looked up, and it was a kid, under that strange, white-silver hair. Probably old enough to be in school, but obviously _not_ in school today, with piercing blue eyes and a truly impressive scowl.

“You’ve seen me,” the kid said.

“So I have,” Tony said. “Who do you belong to?”

“I don’t _belong_ to anyone,” the kid said. “You don’t own people.”

Tony laughed, twitching his hand over his mouth. “Well, true enough, but… who’s your mom?”

The kid stared at him. “That’s classified.”

Tony about choked. “What?”

“She works for the President,” the boy reported. “She’s very important. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

 _Ooookay. Try again._ “Tony rolled his eyes. “Well, my name is Tony Stark. What’s yours?”

“Pietro Maximoff Romanov-Barnes,” the kid said.  

Jesus Christ, the kid’s name was longer than he was. Tony brought up his computer with a wave of his hand; the lightscreen keyboard hovering midair. He accessed personnel. No Romanovs or Romanov-Barnes in the roster. And there were fifteen freaking Barnes. “Now we’re not strangers anymore.”

The kid looked dubious, which was okay. Tony was pretty damned dubious himself.

Also, while he was in there, he checked his email, and discovered that it was bring your kid to work day, which explained why there was a kid here, in the building here, and not at all why there was a kid here, in his office here.

“Which parent brought you in here, today?”

“Dad.”

“And what’s his name?”

“Bucky.”

Tony checked the roster. There was absolutely no _Bucky Barnes_ on his list of employees.

“So, where’s your dad?”

“Dunno,” Pietro said. “I ran off when Wanda blew up the copier.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Who’s Wanda?”

The kid jutted out his jaw. “Sister. Younger sister. Twelve minutes.”

Twins. Great. Tony tapped in a few keys, accessing-- oh, here it was, maintenance called to repair a copier down in CSF. “Okay, well, come on, let’s see if we can find your father, hmmm?”

“Can’t I stay here?”

Tony blinked. “Why would you want to?”

Pietro looked around from his hiding place, leaning against Tony’s knee. “No sisters.”

“Oh, well, I can see that as being an advantage,” Tony said. “On the other hand, I bet your dad’s worried about you.”

“He’s prolly still cleaning up after Wanda,” Pietro pointed out.

“Still…” Tony pushed his desk chair back, stood up and offered the kid a hand. “Let’s go see if we can find him.”

***

There were only so many places Pietro could have gotten to, without having a badge (and Bucky had checked -- twice! -- to make sure his son hadn’t snatched his badge when he was distracted) unless people weren’t paying attention and let a six year old follow them through restricted doors.

He wasn’t up to panic yet; panic about Pietro disappearing had stopped happening around the time he was four, and had disappeared at least once a week for the last year and a half. Now he was just resigned. If he didn’t find his son in the next hour or so, he’d probably work himself up to panicking again.

Pietro had been found any number of places: asleep under a rack of coats at JC Penney’s, inside the ice-cream case at the local grocer’s, in the narrow gap between the sofa and the wall (that had been the one time Nat had actually called the police because the front door of their apartment had also been left open). One time he’d even torn open the bottom of the king-sized box spring in Bucky’s bedroom and hidden _inside_ it.

The first time he’d gone a quick sweep of the floor to see if he could locate his wayward son, Wanda had slipped out of his office and managed to blow up the copier. Literally. She was covered in printer toner in a variety of colors that weren’t usually found in nature. So, she was on her leash, clipped to Bucky’s wrist while he searched.

Cafeteria and vendateria were both child-free (well, free of his child, at any rate). He’d checked with security; no unattended children had left the building, so that was good, at least. He checked the common areas -- two employee lounges; freed Wanda from her clip to check the ladies’ room, while he scoped out the men’s rooms. No Pietro.

He was just headed back up the elevator to see if the kid had managed to get to the public shop floors, where there were two coffee shops, a tea shop, a massage spa, a bistro and a few other places that weren’t strictly Stark Industries, but occupied the first floor.

“Good morning, James,” Pepper Potts said. The look on her face gave Bucky the heads up that her _good_ was sarcastic.

“Ms. Potts,” Bucky said. He very much did not want to see her face as she looked past him at his multi-colored child behind him.

“Mr. Stark is in your office,” she said, her mouth twitching. “He’d like to see you, if you don’t mind.”

_Fuck._

Seeing Tony Stark (Tony Stark!) in his office was surreal. Sure, Bucky knew who the guy was; it was impossible to work in the building and not know who he was. Not to mention that the CEO of Stark Industries was on the cover of Time Magazine more than once (and featured in sleazy tabloids much more than once). There was an enormous portrait of him in the main lobby and some more tasteful, smaller ones, scattered around the building.

Seeing him sitting behind Bucky’s damn desk, tapping away at Bucky’s aging laptop, with Bucky’s damn son in his fucking lap was crazy. He was also handsomely disheveled, hair messed up, his tie open and dangling around his throat, a few buttons of his shirt undone, and his sleeves rolled up. He was also in sock-feet.

Bucky swallowed hard. He knew that Stark was a good-looking man. Four on the top ten most eligible bachelor’s list. His casual noticing that Stark was good looking grabbed water and sunlight and blossomed into a goddamn crush while Stark was just _sitting_ there.

_Fuck._

_I am so, so fucking fired._

He didn’t even know what he’d done (aside from dare to try to have a normal life with his wife and kids, and then his wife had decided she wasn’t done with the game, and had left him to go back to D.C.) but he was going to be fired.

And not just fired, but spectacularly fired. Making the tabloids himself levels of fired.

“Mr. Stark,” Bucky said, standing in the doorway of his office and trying not to cringe.

“Dad!” Piet chirped from his seat on Stark’s lap. “This is my new friend, Tony.”

“Mr. Stark,” Bucky repeated, this time correcting his son.

“Tony’s fine,” the man himself said, waving a hand. “Come in, sit down, this was you?” He pointed at the laptop.

“Wha-- oh, the DDOS solution? Yes, sir. We deployed it this morning.”

“You coded the most efficient solution I’ve ever seen… how long--”

“I’ve been working with the idea for a while, sir,” Bucky said, blinking. What the hell were they talking about this for? “It just got urgent, today.”

“I’ll say,” Stark said. “What are you doing down here?”

“Huh? I mean, I was looking for Piet-- did you… was he in here--”

“No, I found him under my desk, actually,” Stark said. “Beside the point. You left your laptop open, and I helped myself. I do have a master-command code, you know. This is brilliant, I’m… look, here. I have another board meeting about the DDOS this afternoon, and I’d like you to come with me. Show your solution to the board, I’m very impressed. And grateful. The attack was bad, but it could have been so much worse and I’d like to talk with you about the direction of your career. Your son tells me that you used to work in cyber security at the White House?”

Bucky nodded. “Yes, sir, under Senator Pierce. Until--”

“Until you had an affair with one of the Secret Service agents,” Tony said. “Yes, I looked over your personnel file while I was waiting. Lost your job. She went into retirement for a while, you two tried the picket fence and two point five kids thing for about two years--”

“She left us,” Wanda reported, peering around Bucky’s leg, “for her job. An’--”

“Honey, that’s personal,” Bucky said. Godddamnit, he hated that his kids felt so damn abandoned. “But it was more than that, you know that, right Wanda? Your mom, she just wasn’t happy here. She… likes protecting people. That’s what she does.”

“Dad, c’n Tony come over an’ watch Superfriends with us, this weekend?” Piet asked.

Bucky blinked. What? Huh? “Uh, I’m sure Mr. Stark--”

“--Would love to,” Stark interrupted.

Bucky pinched himself. Surely this had to be some sort of wild nightmare/dream and the alarm was getting ready to go off and he’d have to drag himself through another day at work and--

“Great, sure,” Bucky said, because what the utter fucking hell was he supposed to say.

“Great,” Stark repeated. “Okay, look, I’ll get Ms. Potts to find you someone to look after the twins -- cute as they are, I don’t think the board would find it at all as charming as I do. And… I’ll see you in Stateroom 2, at four o’clock. Don’t be late. We’ll discuss our weekend outing. After? Okay? Ok, kid, I gotta go be bossy for a while now. But I’ll see you soon.”

And then Tony was handing over Bucky’s son with a quick pat on the shoulder and gone in a swirl of expensive cologne.

Bucky walked over to his desk chair, sat down hard. “What… what just happened?”

“You have a playdate with Mr. Tony this weekend,” his son informed him crisply.

Bucky rolled his tongue around in his mouth for a moment. “Okay, then.”

“I like him, he’s nice,” Piet said.

“And cute,” Wanda piped up. “Can we keep him?”

Bucky blinked. “He’s my boss. He’s not even _my_ boss, he’s like my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.”

Who was coming over to his… house. To watch cartoons? With his son. What even was his life?

Bucky continued to stand there, stunned.

“Don’t forget your meeting,” Wanda said, helpfully.

Bucky took a deep breath. He could do this; present his DDOS solution to a board meeting. Right. In his tee and jeans, because the lower floors of SI didn’t have a dress code beyond “yes, please wear clothes.” That were covered with Wanda’s inky handprints.

There was nothing for it; if Stark was going to actually bring him to a board meeting, he wasn’t likely to get fired for looking like he had personally engaged in gladiatorial combat with the office printer.

Two hours later, Ms. Potts was taking his kids off to get an ice-cream and Bucky was wearing a jacket that she presented to him with a quick smile. He hesitated in front of Stateroom two, and then opened the door. Bucky clutched his thumb drive with his slide deck carefully saved on it.

He could do this.

***

_Two months later_

“You look… nice.”

“Always the tone of surprise, Nat,” Bucky said. He glanced in the mirror, tucked his flyaway hair back into the messy little bun at the base of his neck.

“Tell me you didn’t get all dressed up for me,” she said, balancing Wanda on her hip.

“He didn’t,” Piet informed her. “Daddy’s got a date! We’re having mommy time tonight.”

Nat blinked. “Oh. You’re dating again?”

“Yes.” Bucky hadn’t bothered to share that little detail with her, although he’d been delighted to tell her about his sudden -- meteoric, really -- promotion and pay raise.

“That’s good, James,” Nat said. “That’s really… I’m glad to hear it.”

The doorbell rang.

“That’s him!” Piet yelled, running off down the hall. Wanda squirmed to be put down and chased after her twin.

“Him?” Nat’s eyebrow went up. “And the kids--”

“Wanda and Piet love Tony,” Bucky said. “It’s… honestly, it’s because of them that we got together in the first place.”

“I can see we’ll have some catching up to do.”

“After,” Bucky said. “You, erm, you don’t mind, do you?”

“It’s not babysitting,” Nat said. “They are my children, too.”

Bucky nodded. “Okay.”

Tony was in the hall, Bucky could hear him talking earnestly with Wanda, who was telling him all about a dream she had the day before. “... but was it a seedless grape?”

And there he was, Tony, dressed to the nines.

“--and this is our mom,” Piet informed him.

“Ms. Romanov,” Tony greeted her, looking every inch the perfect gentleman. (He wasn’t. Which Bucky had every reason to know, and was delighted by.)

Nat blinked. “Tony Stark.” She whirled on Bucky. “You’re dating _Tony Stark_?”

Tony threaded his hand with Bucky’s, lacing their fingers together. “Yes, yes he is. And he’s running late, so, if you don’t mind, I’m going to steal him now.”

Nat made her little wave, fingers wriggling. “By all means…”

Bucky hugged and kissed his kids goodnight, gave Nat a brief peck on the cheek and pretended not to be affected when Wanda and Piet both insisted on goodnight kisses from Tony as well. Put his arm around his boyfriend’s waist. And reminded himself to send Pepper Potts a gift, for insisting on Bring Your Kids to Work day.

 


End file.
